I grew up on Taylor Swift’s music, beginning with her 2008 album Fearless and throughout the rest of her career. Now, it’s a new decade and era for Swift, but her latest release Midnights reveals how the same fears that haunted her in 2008 remain with her. If there’s anything that stuck with me while listening to Midnights, it’s the fact that Swift remains fearful of being abandoned and left alone.
Swift has never hidden this fact about her. Her past has been haunted by numerous ex-lovers, the harassment of other celebrities (like Kanye and Katy Perry), and even the betrayal of her former record label. Swift is a broken person, and her music reveals that despite all her fame, money, and celebrity glory, she is just as longing for belonging as the rest of us. She writes in her lead single, Anti-Hero:
I have this thing where I get older but just never wiser
Midnights become my afternoons
When my depression works the graveyard shift
All of the people I've ghosted stand there in the room[…]
It's me, hi!
I'm the problem, it's me
At teatime, everybody agrees
I'll stare directly at the sun but never in the mirror
It must be exhausting always rooting for the anti-hero
Indeed, Swift is just as lonely as the rest of us. And oddly enough, Midnights reminds me of Danish theologian Søren Kierkegaard whose work explores this concept of depression and loneliness, which he calls “despair.”
Kierkegaard was himself a broken man, with a history haunted by many fears and heartbreaks. By the age of 22, he experienced the deaths of five siblings, which filled his early years with deep tragedy and anxiety. He eventually fell in love with a woman named Regine Olsen, and even proposed to her. But due to the heaviness of his depression, he decided to break off his engagement with Regine, which led to his estrangement from public life. Historian Clare Carlisle writes,
The break-up…soon became a public affair, and for both Kierkegaard and Regine the pain of separation was deepened by wounded pride. […] Kiekegaard appeared to be either a cad who had carelessly led a young woman astray, or a feeble, irresolute fool who, though twenty-eight years old and a Master of Theology, still did not know his own mind.1
Kierkegaard went on to process his loneliness in writing. In 1849, he published his seminal work The Sickness unto Death, where he reflected on the reality of human despair as “losing oneself” — a reality created by the deprivation of love. For Kierkegaard, love is the fundamental creative power that is the source of human life and identity, without which a person cannot be truly and fully human. Kierkegaard argues that many are losing their “selves” because the world is becoming more and more devoid of love — and thus more lonely and alienating.
We see this today on a massive scale in the American political sphere that has been so drastically polarized due to parties and ideologies, as well as in our churches where Christians are alienated from each other over topics like race, class, gender, and political allegiance. On a more local scale, we are seeing these challenges arise even in our homes, where child abuse remains rampant, and divorces are rising.2 Indeed, a recent study found that 36% of all Americans are struggling with “serious loneliness,” which researchers are now calling a nationwide epidemic.3
Like Kierkegaard, Swift embarks on a deeply self-reflective journey in Midnights to understand this tragic deprivation of love and the fear of being alone. Even with the release of her record-breaking tenth studio album and her rising fame, Swift confesses that loneliness remains a prevalent feeling as she construes herself to be a kind of anti-hero, who not only struggles to receive love but also to love herself. In the closing track, Mastermind, Swift expresses her loneliness further:
No one wanted to play with me as a little kid
So I've been scheming like a criminal ever since
To make them love me and make it seem effortless
Is this the first time I feel the need to confess?
In many ways, Kierkegaard’s exploration of despair is congruous with Swift’s struggle with loneliness. In their respective worlds and time periods, both writers have struggled with the fear of being alone. Despite Kierkegaard’s and Swift’s prominence, the former being a renowned philosopher and the latter being a renowned pop superstar, it seems that no amount of fame or reputation can fully solve the human longing to be loved. If anything, our culture and economy’s overwhelming demands to overproduce and exploit only exaggerate those longings. More people are finding themselves exhausted and overworked, unable to have lives outside of their workplaces, and thus find themselves further alienated from the people who love them and the activities they find joy in.4
Like Taylor Swift and Søren Kierkegaard, many of us suffer from the fears of modern life. Isolated from our loved ones due to the polarization and busyness we are experiencing in politics, everyday life, and the church, it is becoming harder for people to find belonging and receive love. Constantly pulled to and fro by the demands of our workplaces, divided from each other due to political opinions, and isolated by the invulnerable walls we’ve built to segregate ourselves, we struggle to know what it means to defeat the scourge of loneliness.
But I believe there is hope for our modern world. I believe it is to imagine something better and lean further into vulnerability. As Swift and Kierkegaard have shown us, what matters in this lonely world is love — to be there for those who need our love, and to learn what it means to receive love from others in real vulnerability. It is to let our guard down and invite others into our lives, to join arms and love each other toward the transforming path of hope and vulnerability. As Swift reflects in her 2012 song Everything Has Changed, I hope these words inspire us to pursue that vulnerability in this tragic age of deep loneliness:
All my walls stood tall, painted blue
But I’ll take ‘em down, take ‘em down
And open up the door for you.
Clare Carlisle, Philosopher of the Heart: The Restless Life of Søren Kierkegaard (Broadway: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2019), 26.